Hello to everyone reading this.

I’m writing this in April 2024. After weeks of contemplation, as I write this, I’m engulfed in a conviction I’ve never experienced before. A belief that we’re standing at the precipice of a wave as significant as the change the iPhone brought in 2007. This wave will come as a massive transformation, combining the reality we’re standing in now with the future that’s approaching. So what reality are we in, and what future is coming?

When Jobs launched the iPhone at WWDC 2007, people couldn’t even imagine how deeply smartphones would be integrated into our lives. Seventeen years later, all the companies we now call Big Tech—FAANG—have achieved their current scale by riding this smartphone wave.

We need to pay attention to the changes in people during this process. Even just six years ago in 2018, our parents weren’t familiar with various smartphone services. They refused to use KakaoTalk saying it was difficult, and got most of their information from broadcasts or print news. What about now? Parents also get information from YouTube, check on their children through KakaoTalk, and easily download and use new applications.

What results are these changes in people producing? Regardless of information accuracy, anyone can now post information, and everyone is living in an age of information overload. From when humanity started keeping records until the 2000s, the total amount of data created was about 20 exabytes. What about now? 300 exabytes are created daily. Fifteen times more data than humanity’s 5,000-year history is being accumulated in a single day. It took less than 20 years to reach this speed of data accumulation.

So what developments are coming our way? I believe there are two areas: AI and cryptocurrency. These two may seem very different at first glance, but they share similarities with various technologies that have caused revolutions and innovations. They’re technologies that solve problems we thought were unsolvable, enabling us to solve problems at lower costs. Document summarization that used to require hiring people at significant cost can now be handled by GPT, and asset managers can be replaced by smart contract programs that execute desired investment strategies on the blockchain.

These two technologies coincidentally started forming markets at very similar times, and people’s perceptions changed and policies began accepting them at similar times. Among non-engineers, there are now people who know about GPT and are thinking about new applications. The approval of the BTC ETF by the existing financial system, which seemed like it would never accept it, happened just this year.

What happens when the individual changes I mentioned earlier combine with these technological changes? What will become important five years from now? Ten years? My hypothesis is as follows:

As people struggle in the torrent of countless data, the most important human cognitive ability—the ability to define problems and find solutions—will become paramount. Among these, the ability to properly define problems will become most important. Efficient decision-making will also become a very important skill amid the ever-accelerating market pace. Meanwhile, various repetitive knowledge work tasks that people have been doing as a matter of course—analyzing data, identifying relationships between new and existing data—will all be replaceable. Much more will be replaced than we can imagine.

To prepare for this future, various attempts are most important. Try things you think might not work. Personally, I’m conducting various experiments to reduce my cognitive load while acquiring new knowledge, tracking various problems that arise, and reducing the various tasks I need to handle as a human being (like regularly going to the hair salon or making hospital appointments). I’m repeatedly hypothesizing and testing how these technologies might be utilized. If these small successes accumulate, I’ll be able to apply them to bigger and more important things. By expanding the range of what’s applicable, the future I’ve dreamed of will gradually become possible.

However, what’s always important is not losing sight of what’s essential. I’ve seen many cases where people become absorbed in the charm of new technologies and fail to use these features properly. In the end, the most important thing isn’t using technology well, but realizing what’s becoming important and finding ways to develop and utilize that ability. I believe that ability is precisely defining and solving problems well. All new technologies should serve to assist in that direction.

If this imagination becomes reality, many propositions we’ve taken for granted will be broken. For example, propositions like “running a large-scale business requires many people.” Ten years from now, we might witness the birth of a unicorn company with just one employee. A company boasting the same enterprise value as Samsung Electronics might be using a small 10-pyeong officetel as its office. What other propositions will be broken? How will our lives change over the next 10 years? When I imagine these things, I’m so excited about the coming future.

I hope everyone reading this will ask themselves how the future will change and fill their own canvas. I’m also slowly preparing to draw my own picture and fill my own canvas. The technologies that have changed our lives over the past 10 years were once blank canvases too, and most of the people who started drawing on them have made their canvas drawings into reality. And a blank canvas to fill the next 10 years is placed before us. If you think this is an opportunity, please don’t miss it.